You Can Now Access One of California's Quirkiest Wonders

RECREATING A FAVORITE PLACE... on your balcony, near a side porch, or in your yard? Plenty of road-trippers try to add some of the beautiful touchstones and alluring details of their most-adored destinations. That may mean planting a prickly pear cactus in a garden, if you're a desert devotee, or purchasing a young fir tree if you're a maven of the mountains. But if you're fully entranced by Devils Postpile National Monument, which can be found a short drive beyond Mammoth Mountain in the Sierra Nevada? Talk about your ambitious backyard projects. For the astounding natural wonder absolutely brims with massive columnar balsalt, making it one of California's most colossally cool and mind-bendingly surreal sights. So reproducing a realistic ode to Devils Postpile on your home turf? That's a garden challenge that might even stump the experts.

BUT ROAD TRIPS ARE POSSIBLE... to the fairly remote place, at least for a few months of the year. Snow has to be cleared from Reds Meadow Road first, which means that visitors can wend their way to the postpile, and gorgeous Reds Meadow, too, sometime around the start of summer, depending on the road-clearing schedule. And that fabled road? Oh joy: It reopened on June 17, 2021 for another seasonal run, before the snows return in late September or thereabouts. But wait: The Reds Meadow/Devils Postpile shuttle is not yet running, so you'll want to circle July 2 on your calendar, if you'd like to catch this classic transportation down into the Reds Meadow area, which also boasts ethereal Rainbow Falls and several stunning hikes.

FOR SHUTTLE TICKET PRICES, details on what to expect when visiting, and more on these awesome (in the truest sense of the word) obelisks, which boast an eye-catching geometry and make for fantastical, almost fictional photographs, visit the official National Park Service site now.